Perrault argues that rules of architecture be determined by reason, not by ancient precedent.

A theoretical history of anthropomorphism and proportion in modern architecture, this volume brings into focus the discourse around proportion with current problems of post-humanism in architecture alongside the new possibilities made available through digital technologies. The book examines how the body and its ordering has served as a central site of architectural discourse in recent decades, especially in attempts to reformulate architecture’s relationship to humanism, modernism and technology. Challenging some concepts and categories of architectural history and situates current debates within a broader cultural and technological context, Hight makes complex ideas easily accessible. Extensively illustrated and written without academic jargon for an informed but non-specialized architectural audience, this book elucidates the often obscure debates of avant-garde architectural discourse and design, while demonstrating how these debates have affected everyday places and concepts of architecture. As a result, it will appeal to professional architects, academics and students, combining as it does an insightful introduction to the fundamental issues of architectural history and theory over the past fifty years with entirely new formulations of what that history is and means.

Visiting Britain in the mid-18th century, Andre Rouquet wrote that ""in England more than in any other country, every man would fain be his own architect."" Not surprisingly, then, several of the most important 18th-century British authors were also practicing architects: John Vanbrugh, a playwrite, designed Blenheim Palace; the poet Alexander Pope offered architectural drawings for redesigning the houses of friends; and Horace Walpole claimed that the home he renovated, Strawberry Hill, inspired his Novel ""The Castle of Otranto"". The work of John Milton and Thomas Gray also exhibits an abiding interest in architecture. By examining the connections between literature and architecture in the work of these writers and by viewing architecture in literary terms, Lee Morissey traces a narrative of cultural change in the Augustan age and beyond. A literary scholar with a strong background in architectural theory and practice, Morissey examines architectural references made by these authors and architectural publications familiar to them. Each chapter establishes a connection with architecture in the careers of an author and then describes how a principal text - ""Paradise Lost"", ""The Provok'd Wife"", ""An Essay on Man"", ""Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"", and ""The Castle of Otranto"" - focuses the literary and historical issues of the period in architectural terms. While some 20th-century architectural theorists have worried that treating architecture in literary terms robs it of its social function, Morrissey argues that architecture can be a language and still participate in political and social contexts, because language itself is political and social. The fruit of his argument is a unique intellectual history of late 17th- and early 18th-century Britain of use to scholars of architectural history and landscape architecture as well as of literature.

As a master of his discipline, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius has been read widely for centuries. This collection of essays by an international team of experts investigates his influence and reception in ideas, artistic forms, and building practices from antiquity to modern day. The stories of influence told in these pages suggest that it is the unbridgeable gulf between the Vitruvian text and surviving monuments that makes reading the Ten Books so endlessly compelling. The contributors to this volume offer their own, original readings, which are organized into the five sections: transmission; translation; reception; practice; and Vitruvian topics.

This innovative title provides an in-depth interdisciplinary study of the influence of theatre and fiction in defining character in eighteenth century architecture, pushing current architects to rediscover the communicative aspects of their work.

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) regarded the Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–5) and its companion volume, the Graphic Portion (1821), as both a basic course for future civil engineers and a treatise. Focusing the practice of architecture on utilitarian and economic values, he assailed the rationale behind classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism. His formal systematization of plans, elevations, and sections transformed architectural design into a selective modular typology in which symmetry and simple geometrical forms prevailed. His emphasis on pragmatic values, to the exclusion of metaphysical concerns, represented architecture as a closed system that subjected its own formal language to logical processes. Now published in English for the first time, the Précis and the Graphic Portion are classics of architectural education.